Pages

August 09, 2015

79% of enterprises surveyed have Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives in place today to better understand customers, products, the locations in which they do business with customers, or their supply chains. 45% of enterprises use IoT technologies to monitor production and distribution operations. 40% of Enterprises Are Growing Their Services Businesses With Internet of Things Initiatives. Manufacturers expect Internet of Things initiatives to drive an average 27.1% revenue increase by 2018.

One of the reasons I love being an entrepreneur is that there's an infinite amount I can learn that will help my company. As the CEO, I have the freedom to learn how to build, sell, and market our software. As opposed to working in a corporate environment, in startups adaptability is crucial. You have to be able to change gears quickly, and pick up a new skill on the fly. It can be daunting, but at the same time there's no better feeling than seeing progress through learning. Below, I'll list three skills that are crucial for tech founders, especially CEOs, to learn. Also, I'll go into how you can pick up a foundation for these skills as fast as possible.

Spark is especially useful for parallel processing of distributed data with iterative algorithms. As discussed in The 5-Minute Guide to Understanding the Significance of Apache Spark, Spark tries to keep things in memory, whereas MapReduce involves more reading and writing from disk. As shown in the image below, for each MapReduce Job, data is read from an HDFS file for a mapper, written to and from a SequenceFile in between, and then written to an output file from a reducer. When a chain of multiple jobs is needed, Spark can execute much faster by keeping data in memory. For the record, there are benefits to writing to disk, as disk is more fault tolerant than memory.

The scale of Digital India — attempting to transform the 70% of the population of what is soon to be the world’s largest country who live in ancient villages into a knowledge economy ... In a more gentle, arguably Indian way, Digital India leaves people in place, except as they may migrate to only to neighboring villages with better broadband connections, relying on the attractive power of the Internet to get people to pass boldly into that other world. Our role in the past seven days in Kakelao was to help to make that power as apparent as possible to educators, government, local businesses and students, and to help Kakelao set up structures that will enable passionate pursuit of what its broadband connection will offer.

The vulnerability was discovered by researchers from security firm Check Point Software Technologies, who presented it Thursday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. According to them, it affects hundreds of millions of Android devices from many manufacturers including Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, HTC, Huawei Technologies and ZTE. ... Because Android does not provide a native way for apps to verify each other, manufacturers had to implement the functionality themselves and in most cases made errors that could allow other apps to masquerade as the legitimate ones and interact with the plug-in, the researchers said.

The naming system used by DNS is a hierarchical namespace, called the DNS namespace. The DNS namespace has a unique root. The root can contain numerous subdomains. Each subdomain also can contain multiple subdomains. The DNS namespace uses a logical tree structure wherein an entity is subordinate to the entity which resides over it. Each node in the DNS domain tree has a name, which is called a label. The label can be up to 63 characters. Nodes that are located on the same branch within the DNS domain tree must have different names. Nodes that reside on separate branches in the DNS hierarchy can have the same name. Each node in the DNS domain tree or DNS hierarchy is identified by a FQDN.

There have been many discussions among cybersecurity experts regarding the security challenges that IoT presents.Gartner forecasts that 4.9 billion connected things will be in use in 2015, up 30 percent from 2014, and will reach 25 billion by 2020. The additions of these devices will make our networks more complex, and in turn, increase the greater potential impact that can occur as a result of a breach. Nevertheless, despite the recent events of cybersecurity failures, we seem committed to adopting IoT technology without having a security plan in place. The IoT era brings with it more security questions than answers.

So if you are business strategist, you might be asking at this point why you should also want this relationship. The answer is simple, “running the business and changing it are not sequential but parallel pursuits… Managers need to compete for today and prepare for tomorrow with no letup on either front”. And while planning for today requires organization; planning for tomorrow quite often requires the opposite, reorganization. To deliver on this requirement, “organizations must do more than just change. They must transform. As technology’s role in business becomes ever more important, transformations will increasingly be underpinned by significant technology programs.”

For now, Ellipse is a canary down the mine for researchers. In a very short space of time, a more advanced version will collate all online published research, blogs, podcasts, YouTube video and press releases. Insight could be delivered in a cloud-based dashboard allowing any member of the organisation to instantly find answers to their business questions. Insight derived in the same time it would take a human researcher to finish the morning emails. I am calling this new market Insight-as-a-service or the Insight-on-Demand Economy. Neither are particularly catchy, however.

The first problem is related to containers. I'm not saying containers are a problem - except when it comes to sprawl and app containers - they are in fact an excellent future invisible subsystem focused on issues such as portability. ... Somehow, and this is a more recent phenomenon the idea that you don't need to worry about package management has appeared in certain quarters. Package management is just as important in a world of compute as a utility as it was in a world of compute as a product. Ignoring it has lead to an issue that some IT landscapes contain components that people don't know how to recreate especially since the person that created the component has left the company. This is not healthy.

Quote for the day:“The more the level of insecurity is reduced, the more the level of faith will grow.” -- Victor Manuel Rivera